Tactile vibrations are often desirable in a user interface device. Touch unifies the spatial senses; those you use to navigate your way through the world—sight, sound, and touch. Touch produces reflex-rate response in milliseconds (ms) and supplies a completeness that sight and sound together can't replace.
In a user interface device, it is useful to have tactile vibrations match sound such as when a music file is played on a cell phone. Audio for end-user devices may be encoded in two basic ways: in a structured representational format, such as a protocol which symbolically encodes the sounds to be played into a string of known symbols (e.g. Musical Instrument Digital Interface or “MIDI”); and as digital sampled audio, which is a set of periodic samples of the audio waveform.
Currently, sampled audio files can be converted through manual conversion. A human designer listens, analyzes, and judges the sampled audio file and selects features of the sampled audio from which to create haptic effects. However, human design intervention is a constrained resource.
What is needed is a fully-automated or semi-automated method of converting music files into haptic effects.